NEWS
Tencent buys the makers of Clash of Clans for US$8.5b Tencent has purchased 84% of game developer Supercell for US$8.57b. Yep, the company that made Clash of Clans is now valued at US$10.2b. 100 million people a day play one of Supercell's games like Clash of Clans, Clash Royale, Boom Beach and Hay Day. By having the backing of Tencent, a enormous Chinese internet conglomerate behind them, the Finnish Supercell can further tap in to that ever lucrative Chinese market. Arstechnica muses on what this means for the gaming market in general (the pie of people who game is getting huge and everyone benefits). Discuss
Telstra enters the IoT game with hardware you can get on contract Telstra are entering the smart home game by launching 10 Internet of Things devices that people can get on a 24 month contract. The Telstra Smart Home product range consists of smart lightbulbs, window sensors, door sensors, wide-beam motion sensors, a smart power plug, a Lockwood smart door lock, a smart thermostat, an outdoor Wi-Fi camera, an indoor Wi-Fi camera and of course, an app to control everything with and a hub for all the stuff to talk to. Will be out later this year, I assume from every Telstra store in the country and easily available to tack on to your existing mobile phone plan for a low $10/m or something like that. Gizmodo has some better pics of the products. Discuss
Elon Musk's Tesla buys Elon Musk's Solar City Tesla is buying Solar City. For those unfamiliar with Solar City, it's Elon Musk's cousin's company, where Elon chairman. Solar City install solar panels on your house for free, then you pay them for the electricity your house uses, which is cheaper than that from your power company. The Solar City plan is to lose money up front on the install of solar panels, but then play the long game in reaping electricity usage fees off the owners of those solar panels installed for free. Tesla is buying Solar City and using subsuming its operation into Tesla. Interesting business model - I wonder if they'll extend that to a sweet Model S? Discuss
Twitter, Vine, Instagram and Tumblr did some stuff today Twitter launched an app for "pro" Twitter users called Engage. Vines can now be 140 seconds long. Instagram has 500 million monthly active users, gaining an extra 100m since September. Tumblr has implemented slick embedding of various live streaming video services like YouTube and some others I've never heard of. There ya go, all caught up in the world of social media platforms. Discuss
Say hello to the fastest consumer SSD available, the Samsung SM961 Samsung are unleashing the SM961 SSD - a new king of consumer SSD performance. These new M.2 NVMe SSDs read and write at over 3000MB/sec, achieve 350,000 write and 450,000 read random IOPS and cost less than their predecessors ($320 for 512GB!). Old mate Rod from RamCity has managed to get his hands on a load of these OEM SSDs and will be the first (and possibly only) place you can buy them from if you're after a seriously fast SSD and the Samsung 950 Pro is just too slow (or the Intel 750 is too expensive). Discuss
COOL SHIT
Sharepoint is on iOS, sorry Get ready for a bunch of Sharepoint bullshit from your work to be available on your iPhone! Microsoft's aggressive iOS app release schedule has delivered Sharepoint on iOS. All that juicy info stored on your company's intranet will be available with you wherever you go. Never again will you forget to file that TPS report because you couldn't find the template. Don't worry Android users, you'll get your turn later on in the year. Discuss
Watch 12 minutes of Civ 6 gameplay Firaxis has graced us with 12 minutes of glorious Civ 6 gameplay at E3. A little glimpse at what's new in my favourite game franchise. They're apparently going to base the AI leaders on what their real life tendencies were - so Ghandi will no longer nuke your capital city, I assume. Also cities can now spread over multiple tiles and workers build stuff immediately rather than in a few turns. Discuss
Post to Instagram directly from Lightroom Photographers wanting to publish their fancy DSLR taken photos on Instagram can now do so directly from Adobe's Lightroom. The LR/Instagram plugin uploads to Instagram, lets you include a caption and hashtags, as well as cropping to an appropriate aspect ratio (or just leaving it as is and letting Insta do the padding). If you've got multiple accounts, this plugin lets you spam them all at once, hah. Discuss
Here endeth the sizzle (until tomorrow!) --Anthony
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